Industrial Complex 16, The Carver Institute
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.3.4 Interstellar
Carter Devours was having a bad day. He’d been woken by corporate while he was supposed to be off shift and sent, along with twenty-three other irate corpo-sec officers, to sweep the second district for a rogue team of aspirants.
Part of him relished the assignment. He’d always thought the Trials were an overblown sport competition, and that with the resources and intel aspirants were given, he could have done a better job. Besides, the team he was hunting was made up of sun-side savages—deadly in the jungles, but what could they do in the blocks and passages of the Carver Institute? This was his domain, and he intended to get the job done and get back off-shift with a well-deserved bonus to boot.
The Cult taking the noosphere offline hadn’t helped. Apparently, they didn’t want the rogue aspirants to be able to coordinate with their co-conspirators or call for outside assistance. That was all well and good, but it meant that Devours could only stay connected to the officers in his sweep or to his sergeant through emergency hard lines. The wider search was supposedly being managed by some Cult muckety-muck in Dome-sec HQ, but Devours didn’t like moving in blind.
His team entered Industrial Complex 16 near the middle of the third shift and started their search. The building had been evacuated, all the workers’ and administrators’ IDs scanned before being sent back to their habs and told to wait. It was a mixed-use fabrication complex—Devours didn’t know much about factory layouts, but he knew enough to see that there were several differently configured assembly lines, making it harder to spot what was out of place. Like any Carverite, he also knew how quickly a spilled chemical container or the swing of a robotic arm could change someone’s life for the worse, so he moved cautiously through the well-lit space.
Fredericks and Hadoon were the first to drop off the team net. One moment, their locators showed in Devours’ retinal display, and the next, they were gone. DesCinq and Mardrake immediately moved to investigate, but they disappeared, too.
“Regroup!” Devours shouted over the comm. “They’re in here with us! Regroup, damn you!”
A single shot rang out, and Devours howled in pain as a bullet tore through his arm, missing both forearm bones and tearing through his wrist comm.
Devours threw himself to the side, ears ringing with pain, hiding behind a control console. He pulled his belt from his waist and struggled with his right hand and his teeth to secure a tourniquet around his arm beneath the elbow. He was digitally cut off from the others, but he heard shouts and more gunshots.
He heard screams.
“Are you able to move?” Corporal Vigneaux asked him.
“I’m fine!” Devours spat, struggling to his feet. “Just point me at those animals, and I—”
Vigneaux was gone. He’d been standing there one moment, and then something bigger than Devours could comprehend and faster than it had any right to be had seized the corporal by the face and snatched him out of view.
Devours pulled the stunner out of its holster with a shaking hand.
The lights went out.
“Screw this!” he said, turning to run.
He made it three steps before something wrapped around his legs, and he fell over, slamming his chin on the floor, cracking his teeth.
***
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“This would be easier if we just killed them,” Elsbeth, the Pugarian trapper, said. She triggered the electro-bola and gave the fallen corpo-sec guard another five seconds of juice to make sure he was unconscious, and he flopped around like a landed fish.
“We need to think longer term,” Brago said, grabbing the guard by the ankle and dragging him, leaving a blood trail. “Invarian doesn’t kill unless he has to. We want to encourage that kind of thinking.”
“No ship or cryo pods this time,” Isaac, the Motragi sniper, said.
“Exactly,” Brago said, laying the passed-out guard by his fellows and kneeling to tend to the man’s wounds. “Nice shot, here,” he said, looking at the neat hole through the man’s wrist. “Should heal nicely.”
“Thanks,” the sniper said.
The guards who weren’t unconscious were bound, gagged, and their wrist comms signal-blocked with stick-on patches. They cowered in terror.
“It would still be easier to kill them,” Elsbeth said, pouting.
“We slept through the changing of the world, my friends,” Brago said, standing up. “I only wish…” He frowned.
“He was a good kid,” Isaac said.
“He was,” Elsbeth agreed.
Brago nodded to himself and felt the enormous and appalling loss of his grandson, not as a time traveler who could blink and see the world turn by the decade but as a man who would have to stand before his daughter and beg for her forgiveness. “Maybe it shouldn’t be easy.”
“Penance,” Isaac said.
“Yes,” Brago answered, blinking away tears. “And unending regret.”
***
Janus tried to keep calm as he gripped the auto-ascender and walked up the side of the mountain behind Mick and next to Koni and Ryler. Five hundred meters didn’t seem like that far when you were out on the road, but it was a long way to drop without so much as air pressure to slow you down.
Fury had been fine being taken back out into the vacuum, but she had lost it when Janus tried to step out into the open air. She’d struggled and scratched so much that Janus had worried about his suit’s integrity, and he had Lira sedate her.
Now, the jungle dragon hung limply behind him as he tried to lean back and walk up the side of the cliff. She had a clear inflatable helmet over her head, the kind they made for children in case of an emergency breach, and it was adorable.
He thought about other irrelevant things as he climbed, like whether his son would look like him or Lee, whether Fury would get big enough for Xander to ride her, whether Janus could get his old job at the recycling plant back if he made it home, and if Mick wasn’t right about taking those flyers for a spin. The five of them were completely exposed on the cliff face, protected by a handful of Motragi rangers who would die in seconds if discovered.
Fifty more meters to go, he told himself.
He put one foot in front of the other until the rangers pulled him over the edge of the cliff.
“Any sign we’ve been spotted?” Janus asked.
“First sign of that would have been the whistling in your ears as you fell,” Vincent said. “I’m kidding! Is he always this serious?”
“All the time,” Lira and Mick said together.
Vincent grunted. “Well, we’re all set to breach at the target location. I have one of my people ready to create a little diversion at the most obvious entry point. We’ll see if Occam’s razor can’t bleed them a bit,” he said with a wink.
“Will they be all right?” Janus asked, concerned he was sending another ranger—this time Motragi—to their death.
“She’ll be fine. As soon as the charges blow, she’ll be over the edge and down the cliff like a spider monkey.”
“I hate spider monkeys,” Lira said.
“Those are monkey spiders,” Mick said.
“Yes! Those.”
Janus chuckled and shook his head. “Let’s get inside, then.”
Vincent gave him a suited thumbs up.
The team followed the rangers to a small, portable airlock they’d set up. It was a standard emergency seal, the kind people on Irkalla used for dome repairs, although it was usually easier to seal the inner surface and work from the outside.
As soon as they were all standing within the lightweight metal frame, the rangers raised the PTFE and fluorocarbon tent, sealing it to the dome. Then, they pressurized it.
Vincent placed the last of the piton charges while another ranger hefted a sledgehammer.
“Ready?” the veteran asked.
“Do it,” Janus said.
The ranger swung the hammer. Tink, tink.
***
Architect Donnika frowned. It was the worst timing, of course—it always was—but there were two possible breaches detected by the Carver Institute’s security system.
The first was an aggressive breach of the dome at the midpoint between the primary airlock and the nearest maintenance access. It was where she would have breached the dome, and she’d stationed an aspirant team there. “Corvesson, you have an intruder.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the zee-gee aspirant from an asteroid habitat said. “Waiting for the dust to clear.”
Good, Donnika thought.
The second security breach had barely registered. It was a small fluctuation, the kind that happened when someone was trying to be clever. They couldn’t have known that Donnika had slightly lowered dome pressure since she took control, which meant that a team pressurizing a portable airlock to one atmosphere would cause a micro-disruption in nearby pressure sensors.
Donnika smiled. Either some random coldsider raider was about to have a very bad day, or she had Invarian and Abraxxis dead to rights. “All remaining teams, converge on second district, sector five. Be on the lookout for void-suited intruders.”